Online social networks facilitate sharing of information and interaction among users of the social network. Users typically register with the social network in order for their respective information, interests, preferences, and other associated data to persist over successive sessions. Although the vast majority of users engage in authorized activity on the network, unfortunately there is a subset of users that may engage in unauthorized activity that is adverse to other users and/or the social network at large. Examples of unauthorized activity include spamming one or more other users or scrapping information about one or more other users from the social network platform.
Such users often proactively attempt to obfuscate their unauthorized activity. Thus, it may not be straightforward to detect such activity and/or who the users are that are responsible. Furthermore, when a social network has millions or hundreds of millions of registered users, the amount of activity generated by the registered users on the social network platform at any given time is of such a scale that maintaining a safe network without unduly restricting users or activities is difficult.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.